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Ibrahim El Bakraoui, the Belgian terrorist who killed himself and at least 30 other people in the Brussels airport attack was a known terrorist deported from Turkey last year. Both Ibrahim and is younger brother, Khalid, who also died in the attack, were well known to police.

Both men were convicted criminals. Ibrahim was sentenced to nine years in prison for opening fire on police with a Kalashnikov rifle during an armed robbery on a stockbroker and Khalid was sentenced to five years probation for carjackings. Khalid was in possession of a Kalashnikov at the time of his arrest.

Najim Laachraoui, named as the third attacker, was the subject of a manhunt in connection with the Paris attack last November. Laachraoui was named as an accomplice of Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested in the Molenbeek district of Brussels earlier this week. Abdeslam hid in plain sight for months.

These remarkable “intelligence failures” will now be used to call for more draconian police and surveillance state measures in Europe and the United States.

Alain Winants, the former Belgian intelligence service boss, told Reuters after the attack Belgium has been slow to adopt modern surveillance techniques and equipment, such as phone tapping. “James Bond could never be a Belgian,” he told Time in January.

“I think that the way to solve the problem is to increase the resources and the powers of our intelligence and security services,” said Thomas Renard, a terrorism expert at the Egmont Institute, a Brussels-based think-tank.

In 2013, Stewart Baker, formerly the NSA’s general counsel, told the House Judiciary Committee Europeans are more likely to be surveilled by government than Americans.

“According to the Max Planck Institute, you’re 100 times more likely to be surveilled by your own government if you live in the Netherlands or you live in Italy,” Baker said. “You’re 30 to 50 times more likely to be surveilled if you’re a French or a German national than in the United States.”

Citing Germany’s Office of Criminal Investigation, Christopher Wolf, a lawyer specializing in privacy who authored a report on surveillance operations, argues European intelligence agencies have a free hand when conducting surveillance. “You don’t have legislative oversight. In fact, the national security investigations are done completely in the dark or mostly in the dark.,” he said.

The Brussels and Paris attacks will be exploited as part of an ongoing effort to increase surveillance and reduce the privacy of citizens. Following the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris last year governments in Europe rushed to introduce new legislation. “Some of the measures under consideration, however, are so sweeping that they would allow the state to monitor the private communications of every citizen,” writes The Irish Times.

David Lyon, a professor of surveillance studies at Queen’s University, identified several public surveillance trends in Europe and the United States. He concluded surveillance is “increasing at an accelerating rate.”

In January, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on the sidelines of the Davos globalist confab his country’s state of emergency will last until the “total and global war” against the Islamic State is complete.

“A decree similar to the USA Patriot Act was hastily put together to allow searches in all buildings and private residences, and the preemptive arrest, without probable cause, of any individual deemed by French authorities to be suspect or dangerous. The notion of dangerous is, of course, vague and elastic and could potentially apply to anyone, including political dissidents,” writes Gilbert Mercier.

In response thousands of people marched in 70 French cities in January against the measures. A poll conducted by Atlantico, however, founded as many as 79 percent of French people support the prolongation of the state of emergency for three more months.

Gladio Redux

“Considering the Western World’s long tradition of false flag orchestrations, the ‘terrorist attacks’ in Paris could be the most recent manifestation,” Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote following the Paris attacks in November.

“Some people are so naive and stupid as to think that no government would kill its own citizens. But governments do so all the time. There are an endless number of false flag attacks, such as Operation Gladio. Operation Gladio was a CIA/Italian intelligence operation that relentlessly bombed innocent Italians, such as those waiting in a train station, murdering hundreds, and then blaming the violence on the European communist parties in the post-WW II era in order to block the communists from electoral gains,” writes Roberts.

European governments are concerned about the rise of populist and nationalist groups in response to a massive influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa. In addition, the status quo is threatened by political groups opposing austerity and other economic policies forced on the content by central bankers and the international financial elite.

Widespread and increasingly all-encompassing surveillance is not primarily designed to catch terrorists. It is designed to subvert political groups considered a threat to the state.

“The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those ‘doing wrong’—the bad people—ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. ‘Doing something wrong’ in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat,” writes Glenn Greenwald.

Following the imposition of a state of emergency in France after the Paris attacks the police put two dozen political activists under house arrest to prevent them from protesting during the Paris climate summit.

Quotes

Government and freedom are mutually exclusive.

Government is the problem, has always been the problem, and will always be the problem as long as we continue to feed it. Stop voting for it, funding it, doing its dirty work as an employee, contractor, or member of the military, and supporting it in any way and it will cease to exist. Only then will humanity be truly free.- Neo Vida